US Telco Support > AT&T > AT&T U-verse > How to get full 12/2 speed.....??

reply to BiggA

Re: How to get full 12/2 speed.....??

In other words ......cable is affected by how many people on your node versus dsl which is only affected by active computers connected in your home. Thought I'd make it simple for the not so technically people reading this thread.

reply to rolande
@rolande: That's all great in theory. Reality: 1.5mbps dedicated DSL line to the CO with overhead that pulls it below that OR 12mbps cable that actually runs over 13 with Powerboost that runs up to about 25mbps with uploads over 2mbps sustained, up to about 7 with Powerboost. And which is better? Even if we could get ADSL2+, and were closer to the CO, you're still looking at a system that can do 24mbps balls to walls, and AT&T isn't even selling more than 6mbps. The highest I have seen is 15 offered. Our equipment is 9 years old, and can pull that same 24mbps. The newer gear can bond 8 channels.

Agreed. I'm dreading the day I have to drop my 24/3 VDSL for cable... Hope AT&T never gets the caps working!

reply to rolande
You're really overhyping DSL's theoretical technical advantage. The area I want to move has AT&T U-Verse and Metrocast, so I may end up with U-Verse for internet just because they can do 24/3 while Metrocast can only do 25/2. If I was in a Comcast area, it would be a no brainer to get one of the faster cable packages. However, you're talking about upstream congestion, and while U-Verse might be well enough managed to not be congested at the node level, so are many cable systems. Any system that's not buying you virgin bandwidth to a backbone can get congested if it's mismanaged.

Your problems are based on the provider, not the technology.

Reliability is also a provider thing. Comcast is utterly incompetent at having backup and disaster plans for their network. After the hurricane, power was back for a good 5+ days before Comcast bothered to put their stuff back together. Comcast's network randomly goes out once every couple of months for a matter of a couple hours for no reason. OTOH, AT&T has a telco mentality, that their gear won't go down unless it is physically ripped from the poles, which, in a few places it was. For us, AT&T was up the whole time, with landlines running off of battery-diesel setups, and the VRADs all having small, gas-powered generators to recharge their batteries, and larger RTs/ switching gear having diesel generators trailered in to recharge their batteries.

Of course, that doesn't transfer over the cell phone side. AT&T's cell phone network goes haywire (not really down, but not fully functional either) with the slightest power issue, while Verizon is rock solid no matter what.

reply to Merlin
Comcast was proposing 300GB + UBB. 300GB is quite a bit, at least for an individual. For a family, not so much....

Verizon's core CDMA 1x network wasn't affected, it was just LTE having some toothing pains. My point is that when the power has gone out a few times, in my experience, AT&T goes haywire, while Verizon is rock solid.

Comcast's 250GB cap is a little odd, as it's sometimes enforced, and sometimes not...

I don't think anyone is particularly threatened by streaming video. This whole "cord cutting" thing is massively overhyped, and Comcast is signing up triple play subscribers like crazy, even though their phone service is a total rip-off.

reply to BiggA

You could argue that, but you're assuming that a CO has as much bandwidth on a relative basis as a cable head-end. It may or may not.

I've never seen that happen on cable against another subscriber. I think they just put more capacity than they could ever need on the upstream channels to avoid that happening. I have, however, seen it happen many, many times on our own LAN when we effectively block ourselves from getting decent download speeds.

reply to rolande
Yes and no. Traditionally this a problem created from the unidirectional nature of cable TV networks. It's still a problem in a great many areas -- network amps aren't designed for a high frequency return path; look at the distribution amp in/on your house, if you're lucky it's rated up to 85MHz, most are 45-54. D3 helps A LOT in this area by using multiple channels -- a packet can be sent on any one at any time -- vs. D2's DCC channel hop. (which can cause connections to fail, rare, but happens often enough for there to be plenty of posts about it here.) On a CMTS with proper traffic policing, this should be a rare event. (when you have 16mil customers, "rare" can be very non-zero.)

DSL tends to not have this problem because DSLAMs generally have symmetric, high speed uplinks. The same issue *does* happen on DSL, it just takes a lot more people. [tends to happen in the other direction... too many downloads can kill everyone's uploads] (and it's actually more likely on a DSLAM given relatively high over subscription)

reply to Nuckfuts
In regards to comcast triple plays going down......phone & internet....never tv......the comcast people are going door to door to uverse subscribers that used to be with comcast and when you bring up outages with their service they turn around and say but this is xfinity we are talking about and it is a new technology that never has outages. Everyone that got this visit told them that is BS and uverse has never gone down in the how so many years and that they are not switching to xfinity. I myself am one of the people that switched to uverse because of cable co. outages and never looked back. As far as TV cable has it down pat but their phone & internet has quite a few bugs still to work out and xfinity is just hype to sell services just because of the fact that att has had a catchy name (uverse) for their services. Who agrees with this...??

There is no question that Comcast has bad reliability and AT&T is rock solid. It depends on what your priorities are. We can't get DSL more than 1.5mbps, so we're stuck with Comcast. But we wouldn't consider getting phone service with them. At that point, you may as well just get Ooma, it will be as reliable as Comcast, since it depends on Comcast if you have cable internet.

If you have a choice of both for an ISP, then AT&T has the reliability as a plus. Forcing you to use their modem, and the overall hardware setup is a big downside as opposed to owned cable modems, and speeds and tiers vary on cable by market, so that depends on where you are.